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Hi! Can U help me? I'm new in this forum. We are currently having rehersals for "Waiting for Godot" in a state theatre in Germany. We'd all be very curious to know the end of the joke that Estragon starts telling Vladimir: "An Englishman having drunk a little more than usual goes to a brothel" and so on. In the play,the joke is not completely told. Or is it just another joke by Samuel ;-) ??
I have decided to revive this long-dead topic since I've just finished re-reading Beckett's Godot.
I posted here because of the post of Jolly McJollyso, a very interesting one, evaluating the Geulincxian roots in Beckett's work.
I have to say I indeed noticed there's a change between the two acts in the sense Vladimir somehow recognises Estragon and even helps him, whereas in the first act he simply didn't care.
Now I don't know if it's possible to assume Didi and Gogo respecitevely represent mind and body as, for what I've read so far, it seems to me Beckett's way of working is that of drying words out of their meanings - to put it simply, I don't believe Beckett did really use symbols, not in the common sense, as symbols to work should have a referent, that's given by a perfect logic, a system.
What do you think about it?
I think Beckett was a little too triky with words. I personally consider Ionesco as the master of the absurd; rhinocerous in particular.
Thinking about it, I don't even know if Beckett really belonged to the theatre of the absurd, since it was a precise label, and Beckett was foreign to labels!
Of course he was one of the most difficult writers, on the same level as Joyce, although using languages in a very difficult way than his master.
I think Beckett to have been largely misunderstood, especially when comparing his work to that of existentialism; Beckett was not an existentialist and his main cares were for language and philosophical matters, so that I don't think calling his work "nihilistic" or even "pessimist" does help. Not even the term "absurd" does, in my mind;
I've just begun studying his complex body of work, but I have to say it's really difficult to find a key to interpretate his plays, exactly like Kafka.
In Godot I'm very interested about the matter of "dualism" that user pointed out, but... still, is it "correct" to say the mechanism still works? Is it correct to say Didi is the mind as Gogo is the body? Are there any symbols at all in such a drained out language?
The theatre of the absurd has been mentioned, so maybe somemody read Mrożek ("Tango)" or Gombrowicz?